Garrett Owen has grown used to hearing people say that his sound doesn’t match his look. “I’ve been getting this for years,” he says. “‘I looked at you and didn’t think you’d be very good.’ ” Owen is introverted, wears a Stetson hat paired with a member’s only jacket, and…
Keite Young sits at a Deep Ellum bar, a red Kenyan necklace dangling from his neck, and carrying a small leather medicine bag. The Fort Worth native is ready to break what he calls his “eight-year silence” as Medicine Man, his stage alter-ego and soul/rock/hip-hop project with producer Jason Burt. Young made his…
The odds are ever in Ashleigh Smith’s favor, whether she’s in an international voice competition or competing in a beauty pageant. The University of North Texas alumna is stepping up to the front of the stage after spending six years singing backup for Chrisette Michele. Her jazzy R&B debut album,…
Singer and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird visits Dallas on Wednesday night, with a show at the Majestic Theatre. His new album, Are you Serious, keeps with Bird’s tradition of unpredictability. His folk-infused music is alt-rock for the cultured listener, and his grandiose projects have included a sound installation at the Guggenheim Museum. He…
RL’s Blues Palace II, in the Fair Park neighborhood, is a stand-alone venue in more ways than one. Its surrounding streets are far from Dallas’ sanctioned nightlife districts. The adjacent strip mall parking lots get crowded with loiterers on hot summer nights, hanging out on the backs of cars or…
JT Mudd, the frontman of the band Ishi, has been invited to select some tunes at local radio station KNON. It’s before his call time of 10 p.m., and he’s out by the station’s building. The show’s producers have yet to arrive, but he punches the code into the building…
If Leon Bridges’ story followed the typical plot line of a made-for-TV biopic, the Fort Worth R&B singer would have already unraveled after his quick rise to fame. In the span of a year, the now 27-year-old signed a major label deal with Columbia Records, performed on late night TV…
The Dallas Observer has recently been collaborating with a team of videographers known as Exploredinary. (Perhaps you’ve seen this video they made about a party store in Oak Cliff selling Donald Trump piñatas, or this one about Leon Bridges.) We thought it appropriate to tell you a little bit more about…
John Tipton is a familiar figure in the music scene, and a towering one in person. The 6’5″ Dallas native has been in and out of musical projects for the last few years, but Tipton has settled, for the last couple of years, into a band called the Heavy Hands. He…
Daniel Hart is best known in his hometown of Dallas as the lead singer of Dark Rooms, a hip-hop meets-classical, R&B electronic project that he started four years ago. But next month he’ll be walking the red carpet as a film score composer for Disney’s upcoming remake of Pete’s Dragon. …
Coming home to North Texas means a lot of things for Leon Bridges. It’s much more than just the name of his debut album, the album that launched him to overnight stardom a little more than a year ago. It means seeing his mother, whom he supported for years with his…
Sudie is sitting in her bedroom, pointing to a miniature soundproof box which holds her mic and barely allows room to stick her face through. “This is my studio,” she says, adorning the last word with air-quotes. “I made it by cutting up some cheap mattress foam from Walmart.” You…
You may never recognize Siamese from one show to the next. The Dallas band is an avant-garde dream-pop experiment whose members try on different personas seasonally. By changing their concept every few live appearances and rotating themes according to their latest inspiration, the band’s like a DIY Cirque du Soleil,…
It’s a night for alter egos. Even the venue, tucked a few steps away from the main streets of Deep Ellum, is using its second name. Tonight the Lizard Lounge is called The Church, and here the acolytes of the father of suspension have gathered. Inside, the Freaks and Fetish party…
On April 7, two of rock history’s star witnesses will be sharing their life stories at The Kessler Theater in Oak Cliff. Pattie Boyd is music’s Helen of Troy; she has inspired many epic guitar wars. Her first husband, George Harrison, immortalized the way she moved in the Beatles’ “Something,”…
Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters With the Sonics The Bomb Factory, Dallas Tuesday, March 15, 2016 Think of Robert Plant and his decade-plus run with Led Zeppelin, and images of pure hedonism are likely to spring to mind. Flowing hair, open shirts exposing bare chests, metal-heavy riffs, fables…
When promoter Moody Fuqua left The Crown & Harp on Lower Greenville to help revive Deep Ellum’s RBC club, he lugged the former’s hip-hop element along with him. Fuqua wisely delegated Tuesday nights to musical director and bass player extraordinaire Nigel Rivers, who came up with RBC Underground, a themed…
When SuperSonic Lips took the stage at the Dallas Observer Music Awards showcase this past December, they soaked up every bit of spotlight at the dark Deep Ellum metal bar Reno’s Chop Shop. As singer Yaya Lion jumped up and down in a hoodie like a non-pregnant Juno, they became…
Singer Jacob Metcalf appears at a bookstore on Northwest Highway with a truck that’s been vandalized in celebration of his last day at work, silly-stringed with so many colors that it resembles an unraveling and mobile Jackson Pollock painting. In contrast, he’s dressed entirely in beige. Metcalf has been part…
Zhora sits at the Twilite Lounge in Deep Ellum, shooting straight “Kentucky whiskey”, as she called it, in a mock-Southern accent. Zhora is the stage and DJ name of Dallas-based singer Taylor Rea, inspired by a character from Blade Runner. Onstage, she’s a catsuit-wearing siren, moving with the swaggering precision…
Over three years ago, Tessa Byrd grew restless in her life as a business-owning CPA and decided to revisit her short-lived career as a punk singer, which she’d abandoned in high school. At the same time rock drummer Andi Cuba, having earned a degree in social studies, was looking for…
Jude Gonzalez lives in what she calls “the tree house,” a raised backhouse which hovers amongst the trees in the flowing-green Lakewood area. It creates a convincing optical illusion. The interior, just as idyllic, doubles as her massage studio Reinventing You. It has the fairyland quality of a creative spirit materialized…
